“Society Encourages the Killing of Girls Like Me”: Layers of Victimization in Online Dating Romance Scams in Iran That Target Sexual Access Over Financial Gain

Online dating romance scams involve coercing online daters out of their personal property. Money is almost always framed as the target of such scams, however this may be a consequence of prior work’s focus on victims from Western countries and scammers from Africa. There is relatively little knowledge of online dating romance scams that occur entirely within non-Western cultures. To address this we conducted an interview study with 20 victims of online dating romance scams in Iran. Findings show that romance scams were seldom motivated by money, but rather sexual access to a woman’s body through feigning intent to get married (“body scams”). Body scammers were abetted by cultural rules that justify murder and legal punishment of women for premarital sex, thus forcing them into silence. The paper concludes with calls for more expansive definitions of online dating romance scams and the foregrounding of local cultural dynamics in their perpetuation. Content Warning: This paper discusses sexual violence.